From the course: Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

Arnold viewport rendering - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

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Arnold viewport rendering

- [Instructor] Let's begin with the basics. How to render in Arnold, and specifically how to render Arnold in an active viewport. Arnold is now the default renderer in Maya and we can verify that if we go into the render settings window, we'll see that the current renderer is Arnold. And if for some reason Arnold doesn't show up in this list, or if you don't see an Arnold menu in the Maya menus, you may need to enable the Arnold plugin, and that's done from Windows, Settings Preferences, Plugin Manager, and within here, you're looking for something called M2A, which is Maya to Arnold. You'll want that to be loaded and to load automatically when Maya starts. Before I render in the viewport, I just want to clean up the interface a little bit. I've got a bit too many toolbars and panels open right now. First, we can hide the shelf. We can go into the Windows menu and go to UI Elements and disable the shelf. Likewise, since I'm not doing any animation, I can go into Windows, UI Elements, and turn off the Time Slider and also the Range Slider. I'm not going to be using this viewport panel toolbar. I can access the commands I need through the viewport menus. So, just to declutter the interface, I'll hide that panel toolbar. There's a keyboard shortcut for that which is Control + Shift + M. We can render Arnold directly in the viewport; however, I don't recommend doing that in a full screen viewport like this one. It's just going to be too slow to render. So let's go to a four-viewport layout, tap the space bar, and give focus to the perspective view by clicking in it, and to render in Arnold, go into the viewport menus, to Renderer, and choose Arnold. When you do that, you get the Arnold Viewpoint Renderer Options window popping up, and currently, Interactive Production Rendering is not running. And I know that because I get a red triangle over here, and that's supposed to represent a play button. When we click that button, we start the Interactive Production Rendering and now we see Arnold in our viewport. And I know, in this case, that I'm seeing Arnold because, specifically, the icing on this cupcake is subdivided. And I've set that up in the shape node. If we press the stop button here, the red square, now we're back at the Viewport2.0 Rendering and we see that this is an un-subdivided mesh, here. We want to have the play button running and it's fully interactive. We can use any of the keyboard shortcuts, such as alt + left mouse button to tumble around, alt + right mouse button dolly forward and back. If we want to switch back to the Viewport2.0 Rendering, we can either press the stop button, here, or we can go into the Renderer menu and reselect Viewport2.0. Once again, we can render in Arnold by going into Renderer, Arnold and pressing the play button, and it should update just fine; however, there are certain conditions under which the scene will not update. And let's see if I can actually break this here. IPR, or Interactive Production Rendering, is currently running. If I go into the Renderer menu and switch over to Viewpoint2.0, now we see the Viewpoint2.0 rendering, and if I switch back over to Arnold, now, I see a strange situation where my icing has disappeared. Now, this is obviously a bug and it may not happen on your system at all; however, this is a good illustration of, sometimes we get into a situation where we need to fully refresh the scene. So what we'll do here, to get that back, is stop the IPR, go into the Arnold Viewpoint Renderer Options dialogue, and in the Render menu, we have a command, Update Full Scene. Issue that command or use the keyboard shortcut, which is Control + U, and Arnold will reload all the meshes, and lights, and so on in the scene, and then, when we start the Interactive Production Rendering once again, the full scene is rendered correctly. That's the basics of how to use the Arnold Interactive Production Renderer directly in a viewport.

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